


Free as a Bird

by sciencebutch



Category: Marvel 616, The Incredible Hulk (2008), The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Banner-centric, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, we all want ross to die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 15:15:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18210017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencebutch/pseuds/sciencebutch
Summary: “If you took it from me, I’m going to put you in a hole for the rest of your life.”Bruce is cured of the Hulk, and now he can finally go back to his old life. He can go back to Culver, to his research. He can go back to Betty.It's too bad he doesn't always get what he wants.





	Free as a Bird

**Author's Note:**

> why do i write this shit instead of my chaptered works?? good question
> 
> Anyway.
> 
>  
> 
> **warning for suicidal thoughts & ideation**

The memory is hazy, clouded over by the remnants of the tranq in his brain and the debilitating hope that he was finally _free_ of the monster. He was fettered down to a stretcher, being pushed somewhere (Bruce didn’t care where, because he was free, free, _free_ ), Betty jogging alongside him, holding his hand. (And _God_ , Bruce didn’t have to worry about hurting her anymore, because the monster was gone; the only proof of it ever having existed manifesting as the scar on Betty’s forehead).

Bruce doesn’t remember what Ross’ face looked like as the man leaned down to whisper in his ear, he can only recall the General’s breath rumbling through his mind like an earthquake.

It was a threat, a promise. An inevitability:

 _“If you took_ it _from me, I’m going to put you in a hole for the rest of your life._ ”

Bruce hadn’t thought too much about it then, for he believed Ross to be bluffing.

He wasn’t.

  


Bruce was free of the Hulk. They had found this out through days of intense ‘experimentation’ - the phrase Ross had used; though Bruce preferred the term ‘torture’. Bruce had only managed to keep hold of his sanity during those countless, unceasing, agonizing hours because he was _free_. They were going to let him go because the Hulk was no longer a variable in his life. Bruce was a man again and a monster no longer. Dr. Jekyll was free of his Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein was free of his creation.

Bruce was _free_.

He could return to his job, to his research, to _everything_.

 

He could return to Betty.

Bruce was _free_.

 

He wasn’t.

 

The elevator jolted downwards instead of up. When Bruce looked toward Ross, confused, Ross only said:

“I meant what I said, Banner,” as an explanation. And that night on the stretcher returns to him. And the weight of Ross’ words hit him full force. It sends him reeling backwards, as if Ross had punched him instead of just _talking_.

“But I - I just -” he can’t speak, can’t breathe. The elevator is too small, his skin too tight. It feels like how it feels before he transforms, where the monster stretches and bulges from the inside and pushes out, out, _out_.

He just wanted to be _free._

He remembers a moment in that elevator where he thinks that _transforming wouldn’t be a bad idea, right now_ , and wills himself to change and let the monster smash its way out of this elevator.

But he doesn’t. Because he can’t.

He’s free.

Bruce’s skin still prickled with the vestiges of pain, his healing factor gone. They had taken one of his kidneys to see if it would grow back (it didn’t), and the stitches were still fresh on his abdomen.

He was unresponsive as Ross grabbed his shoulder and pushed him out of the elevator, not at all gently. Bruce stumbled forwards, eyes open and unblinking. He still hadn’t registered it. He’s free, he thinks. He’s _free_ , _goddamnit_.

 

He wasn’t.

 

“Punishment fits the crime, you know,” Ross said, his voice like rocks in a blender. He still smoked indoors, even though there was a “NO SMOKING” sign in nearly every room. “You stole government property, military secrets. Just be glad you’re being kept here instead of a federal prison; a milksop like you wouldn’t last ten seconds in a place like that.” Ross pats his shoulder in a perfunctory attempt at comfort, before shoving him inside a cell and leaving.

Bruce isn’t glad. He doesn’t want to be kept anywhere. He remains standing in the same place Ross had left him, shaking. The tears don’t come, though he can feel them burning behind his eyes.

The tears never come. They’re as trapped as he was.

 

Time doesn’t exist in his prison, because the sun doesn’t exist, and neither does the moon. His cell is a mile underground, so celestial bodies might as well be mere fantasies, at this point. In the beginning he thinks that he can count the days that have passed by monitoring his meal cycle, but after a while minutes turn to hours turn to decades and hours become seconds and he thinks they’re altering the times they give him meals because why would he get lunch and dinner mere moments apart? So he stops tallying the days on the cinderblock wall.

(When he started doing it, he thought it a silly cliche; something people did in movies or something. But his memory began faltering after a month or so of no human contact, and he got so scared he would forget his time here that he carved it into the wall with his fingernail.

He doesn’t care about the passage of time anymore, though. He doesn’t care about anything.)

There are 237 white stripes on the wall, going from the ceiling to the floor. A while back he entertained himself by factoring it, but that got boring fast. Now he writes complex equations on every conceivable surface until his fingernails are worn down to the quick and then some.

 

Bruce considers using his own blood as ink, and swears that once his nails grow back enough to slice through skin, he will.

  


Betty was allowed to see him sometimes. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s the only reason he hasn’t killed himself yet. He told Betty this once, because there really isn’t much to talk about on his side. Betty didn’t say anything in response, but her face twisted in fury and she stormed off to scream at her father again.

Bruce liked Betty’s emotions; they’re like a hurricane to his gentle breeze. He doesn’t talk with much inflection anymore.

He replays some of their conversations in his head sometimes.  He starts talking aloud to simulate the experience of human interaction. Bruce has long since accepted that he’s insane, but it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

 

“Hello, Bruce,” Betty stands next to his cot, even though he didn’t hear the door open. Somewhere in his head he knows she’s just a hallucination (she’s not allowed to come into his cell when she visits normally), but it’s nice to pretend.

Bruce heaves himself upright with some difficulty and leans against the wall. She’s the only person he bothers moving for, even if she isn’t real. “Hello, Betty.”

Then, without any preamble, because that’s how brains work; they just bounce from subject from subject with no transition, Betty says:

“This is all your fault, you know.”

“I know,” he replies, monotone. This conversation has happened before like this, but Bruce is unsure if it had actually happened or if it was just another fabrication of his fucked up brain.

“If we had never met, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt,” red begins to dribble from the scar on her forehead and past her bangs. She blinks, and her sclera are stained scarlet.

“I know,” he says, quieter this time.

“I wouldn’t be so hung up on you; I would have my own life, I wouldn’t have to worry about your wellbeing,” the blood drips from her eyes like tears and runs down her cheeks in rivulets. After it falls from her chin it disappears into the ether.

“I know,” his voice is a whisper now, “I know.”

And then Betty’s face rounds out into something softer. Her scowl looks out of place on a mouth that has always been so, so gentle. Betty’s blue eyes become brown, her hair unfurls past her shoulders and down to her mid-back and lightens to the color of honey. The blood is still there, though, but there’s more of it and there’s so much, pouring from the gash on her hairline.

Momma’s mouth opens. Her saccharine voice melds with Betty’s as she talks, in some discordant chorus of righteous bitterness.

“You’re a burden on me, Robert Bruce Banner, that’s all you’ve ever been.”

“I know,” the last syllable cracks and dies in his throat. He can feel himself die with it.

 

Bruce stops eating almost entirely. The feeling of his stomach wringing out every last ounce of energy it can from his body’s reserves is better than no feeling at all.

 

After a week of this, Ross visits him. He’s laying on his cot.

He’s always laying on his cot. It takes too much of his limited energy to move, anyway. Bruce is only not sedentary when Betty visits, real or not.

Ross is a silhouette in the doorway. He stands ramrod straight, unmoving, built like a boulder.

“What,” Bruce says. There’s no question behind it, no feeling. His voice is dull dull _dull_.

“We noticed you stopped eating.” Ross kicks aside some of the food rotting by his foot. It had remained unmoved from where it had been pushed through the slot in the door.

“So what,” Bruce closed his eyes, not wanting to deal with anything anymore.

“How would you like to um,” Ross coughs awkwardly, “not have to eat anything ever again?”

      Bruce lifted his head up, one eyebrow arched in curiosity. Even that meager action sapped his strength. His head was too heavy. “What the fuck do you mean.”

      “How would you like to die, Banner?” Ross asked, obviously fed up with dealing with him. Bruce can relate; he was fed up with dealing with himself, too.

      

      Bruce had considered his mortality before. Death was hardly a stranger. As a kid he watched his mother die and wondered what it would feel like to have his skull crack open like an egg. At least then he could go see Momma again. In middle school he would stand in front of Aunt Susan’s open medicine cabinet for too long, perusing it like one would fresh produce at a farmer’s market, wondering what it would feel like to swallow them all. In high school, bullies beat him for ten minutes in the parking lot. He wondered what would have happened if they had gone on for just a little longer and a little harder. In the Arctic as an adult he was swept up in snow and ice but he really only felt the frigidity of the steel trigger under his thumb.

 

    After that, death became a stranger, because Bruce couldn’t die.

    But now he _could_.

 

    He was _free_.

 

    They bring in a vial of something and Bruce can hear his heartbeat in his ears. It’s weak, like him. _Weak like puny Banner_ , he thinks humorlessly. He has no energy to laugh anymore.

    Betty said she’d be with him until the end. Bruce wished she wouldn’t. There are tears in her eyes. He doesn’t want to hurt her again. Betty holds up a needle and the point glints in the fluorescent lighting. Foreboding cracks through Bruce like a whip.

    Betty doesn’t trust Ross to administer it, she says. Her voice is tight with Ross, and she never looks him in the eye.

 

   Their relationship has always been strained. Perhaps it had finally snapped.

   His last words to her are: “I’m sorry…

 

   “...Thank you.”

 

   He doesn’t know what he thanks her for. Probably everything.

 

* * *

 

   Betty has to carry Bruce after he de-hulks, because they’re being followed. Her father is a creature of habit, and one of his habits happen to be hunting down Bruce Banner with the same relentlessness as Captain Ahab pursuing Moby Dick. Bruce was Ross’ white whale.

 

  She had swapped out the solutions when her father wasn’t looking for something experimental, risky. Something that was meant to bring the Hulk back. Bring _Bruce_ back. It had worked, thank God, and now Bruce was _free_.

 

   The Hulk had grabbed her gently when he appeared, exploding out of Bruce with the same ferocity he did as the first time in that lab. He carried her out, covering vast distances in great leaps and bounds, before he collapsed in the desert, losing his footing in the sand and tumbling over a dune, having decided that his work was done. He left an emaciated Bruce in his wake.

   Betty didn’t waste any time; she ran, carrying Bruce because Bruce was unconscious and probably incapable of running, anyway. He’s so skinny and frail now, more so than he was in college, more so than he was when they reunited in the rain that night after three years. There was no fat on him any more, hardly any muscle. Just bones and organs beneath pallid skin.

    Betty finds a cave to hide in, and she thinks of that night she had with the Hulk when it was storming, and the goliath had yelled at the sky when it rumbled with thunder, almost as if he was yelling at God himself. She tries to find amusement in the irony of caves and how now _she’s_ the one saving Bruce’s life rather than the other way around, because there isn’t really much to find amusement in right now.

 

* * *

 

   Bruce wakes up. He finds this odd. You aren’t supposed to wake up after you die, because that isn’t what death is. Death is a sleep you never wake up from.

 

   So something had gone awry, it seems. He tries to sit up, but there’s an arm around him and he doesn’t have the strength to move it. His muscles hurt. His bones hurt. His everything hurts, like he had been stretched out and then squeezed. Bruce groans. The arm over his hip shifts in response to the noise.

    “You okay?” the voice sounds like Betty.

    “Am I dead?” his tongue is swollen like a sponge in his mouth. His words are slurred from sleep and dehydration.

    “No.”

    Bruce makes a noncommittal sound to that. He wishes he were dead. Or maybe not. He doesn’t know what he wants.

    “Hey,” the voice warns. It sounds like Betty. Bruce turns to look despite the pain. Blue eyes stare pointedly back at him.

    “Hello, Betty,” he greets. Then a pause.

    Then the situation sinks in. Betty’s cuddling him - she never did that before in his prison, hallucination or not - and she’s _real_ and the ground is unforgiving and hard and not his cot. It’s not his cot. Bruce blinks, confused. Some emotion bubbles up in his throat and he inhales sharply. His eyes burn, but the tears don’t come because they never do.

    “You’re okay now, Bruce.”

    “ _How_?” His voice cracks.

    “I traded out the, the _solution_ with a serum I’ve been developing. It was in its experimental stage still, I didn’t know if it would work, but—“

     Bruce kisses her with a desperation akin to a starved man finding food. Her lips are coarse with sand, and his are rough and chapped. It’s the best kiss he’s ever had. His arms snake around her abdomen and he holds her, and she’s real, and she’s solid, and she’s _real._

     “Show me,” he whispers into her neck.

     Betty helps him stand. He can barely walk, and he leans against the wall of the cave with wobbly knees and shaky arms.

     She leads him to the mouth of the cave.

 

    Bruce gazes reverently at the expanse of the New Mexico desert. It’s so big, so open. He’s forgotten how large places could be.

    

    There’s a ledge outside the cave, and he sinks down upon it, his legs finally giving out. Betty doesn’t let him crumble and crash to the ground. She holds him as he looks.

 

    And Bruce finally, _finally_ cries when he sees the sun. The tears run hot down his face and he sobs and hiccups like a child.

    Meanwhile, the Hulk rumbles in his throat at the warmth. And for the first time in forever, Bruce welcomes him. He’s a constant strength, as inherent and instinctual as breathing. The key to his prison.

    “I…” he doesn’t know what to say.

 

    He’s _free._

_..._ And he _was._

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr!


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